The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

Anything a man can imagine, another can create

Your dead sleep quietly, at least, Captain, out of reach of sharks" "Yes, sir, of sharks and men.

With time and thought, one can do a good job.

I wanted to see what no one had yet observed, even if I had to pay for this curiosity with my life.

Hunger, prolonged, is temporary madness! The brain is at work without its required food, and the most fantastic notions fill the mind. Hitherto I had never known what hunger really meant. I was likely to understand it now.

With its untold depths, couldn't the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn't the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia?